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James Cameron's teen chum prizes an early script

He's young, but his face is weathered. His clothes are filthy and torn. He's limping. He has been hunted for a long time.

Richard Dawson, a high school classmate of director James Cameron, looks over a "television play" written by the now-famous director during his high school years. (CARLOS OSORIO / TORONTO STAR)

The opening scene in the five-page script of Paradise is set in the 1980s – the future for a teenaged James Cameron, who penned the so-called "television play" when he was a high school student at Stamford Collegiate in Niagara Falls.

The script, more than 40 years old, was unearthed by Richard Dawson, who went to Stamford with Cameron; he says he was asked to star in it.

The original script, its pages now stained with age, is safely stored in a Toronto apartment. He says he gave a copy to Cameron in 1996 when the director was in Niagara Falls, where his old school was naming its theatre in his honour.

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Now, with Cameron's sci-fi epic Avatar up for nine Academy Awards Sunday, including Best Picture, Dawson has brought a copy of the script out of storage.

"He is the premier director in the world and this lets you see what the guy was writing when he was 17 years old," Dawson, a long-time camera operator with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., said Saturday.

"I think there are a lot of Jim Cameron fans and movie buffs that want to see the beginnings of his scientific thoughts."

Cameron, a reserved student with a penchant for paisley shirts, handed Dawson the script outside their geography class. Take it home and read it, he instructed.

While the two were excited, the film was never made. Cameron's father took a job in California and the family moved away in 1971.

"I knew he was talented. I saw his art, the script; I knew he was good," said Dawson. "But where he is now, who could have imagined that?"

The film, to be shot in black and white, is set in the United States during the Chemical Age. As the narrator explains, drug use exploded throughout the country in the 1970s. Within the decade, the government had legalized marijuana and certain hallucinogenic drugs, such as LSD.

Then, there came a new high: Paradise. Before anyone knew where the needle-injected drug came from, its effects had already spread. Users were transformed into pale-skinned automatons, known as The Packs, hell-bent on stabbing others with Paradise-filled syringes.

The film's protagonists, Man and Girl, are survivors. They meet each other in a derelict hallway and discuss the world's plight.

In a political jab that would surely please Avatar's earth-loving Na'vi people of Pandora, Man blames the problems not on the Paradise drug, but on a society that ran itself and its environment into the ground with over-industrialization.

In the end, they're overcome by a mob of addicts. The final shot is of a progress report written by an alien military official. It becomes clear that the mysterious Paradise drug was released by the aliens to enslave humans. The world is now ready for colonization.

Much like with early drafts of Avatar, the young Cameron – who went by Jim – planned to have special effects that he wasn't even sure how to perform. In the shot of the film's title, the script has a director's note saying the slowly moving shapes and undulations would be "achieved via a number of means depending upon which proves most suitable for black and white."

Yet Cameron was a whiz when it came to supernatural effects. As a set designer for a school play, Cameron rigged up a sound effect to accompany a stone door swinging open. Not even the director knew how he did it.

Meanwhile, he and some other boys built a hot-air balloon out of dry-cleaning bags. The local newspaper headline identified the prank as a possible UFO.

"I probably wrote the screenplay for The Abyss in 11th grade biology class," he said at the high school's celebration in 1996.

Dawson says it's Cameron's innovation that makes him deserving of the Best Picture Oscar. When he talks about it, his raspy voice comes out in rapid, Tommy gun bursts.

He defends the director like a friend would stick up for his buddy in a school hallway.

"I've read these critics who say (Avatar) has no substance and no plot ... and that it doesn't deserve to win. That's a bunch of hogwash."

He also grows defensive over the script. He's careful that he never leaves the room without taking at least some of the five pages to protect it from being copied or leaked. He's also adamant that none of the dialogue be quoted.

Dawson said he would like the script to end up in a museum, perhaps the National Archives in Ottawa or the Library of Congress.

Before that, he wants to get the script signed, and maybe sell it.

"If Michael Jackson's glove went for ($350,000), how much do you think this would go for?" he said.

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